Well, it doesn't begin yet. But it will soon! What adventure? My adventure to Ireland, or Galway to be more specific. Hello! My name is Hilja and I study graphic design at Varia (which is a vocational school in Vantaa, Finland). This is my third, and final, year at this school and we have to do an internship. I wanted to make my life a bit more interesting, so I decided to apply for an international internship. And somehow I managed to pull it off and here we are: almost ready to fly off into Ireland.
I am honestly really really nervous! There are a lot of things to do and responsibilities to have! Luckily for me my good friend Sonja will be joining me on this trip, so we can be nervous and lost together. We will be working at Proactive for three weeks (the 3rd of February – the 21st of February).
We've already booked and Airbnb apartment. My friend made an account and found a great place to stay at. It's relatively cheap and it's only 5 kilometers away from our workplace. I've also booked our two-way tickets to Ireland. We'll be flying to Dublin and taking a three hour bus ride to Galway.
Because I was a big doofus (gotta stay on brand, I suppose) the flight from Dublin to Helsinki, that I booked tickets for, leaves WAY too early. We would not be able to leave Galway on Saturday and make it to our flight. But luckily this problem was a pretty easy fix once I had calmed down my panic of stranding us in Ireland. Because our last work day is on Friday and our flight leaves on Saturday, we've decided to take a bus to Dublin on Friday after work and stay at a hotel for one night.
I've done a bit of research on buses in Galway. Apparently it is recommended to use a Leap Card, which is a card that works on most public transport in Ireland. I will provide more information on this card and how it works once I've gotten used to it (or once I've made a mistake that you can learn from)
This trip would not have been possible if it weren't for our school, so I would like to give a huge thanks to everyone involved in these projects! This is going to be such a great experience. The project includes making some sort of document-type thing of your trip and I decided that making a blog would be fun. Since it would be the easiest way to document my everyday life. I also decided to write it in English because it's the language we will be using there AND I would love to improve my writing skills. So I apologize in advance for some grammatical errors, but the best way to improve is by making mistakes and learning from them.